Dominion Energy plugs into Oracle for outage restoration

image of powerline | Dominion Energy and Oracle

Dominion Energy Virginia is leveraging Oracle Utilities Outage Management System and new advanced distribution management (ADMS) capabilities in Oracle Utilities Network Management System (NMS) to help improve its network visibility, reliability, and outage management response.

The expanded platform will enable the utility to better manage increased data from distributed energy resources (DER) and meet its regulatory requirements.

Providing electricity to 2.7m homes and businesses, Dominion Energy has utilized Oracle Utilities NMS for over a decade to plan and execute key switching activities across its network. The company has upgraded its systems and opted to add Oracle’s Fault Location Isolation and Service Restoration (FLISR) application for automated, self-healing support. By implementing this solution, Dominion Energy will be able to automatically sectionalize outage impact, enable reduction in service interruptions and help increase its service reliability.

Brad Harkavy, vice president, Oracle Energy and Water, said: Our longtime collaboration with Dominion Energy Virginia is the perfect example of how we constantly evolve our ADMS technologies to help utilities more confidently meet their most pressing DER, customer service, regulatory, and other business challenges.

“With NMS, Dominion Energy can add intelligent advanced applications to meet regulatory requirements today, not in 5-10 years. Additionally, with one efficient, scalable platform for OMS, they will gain efficiencies that transcend business operations. Field crew will benefit from mobile applications that expedite their restoration activities during potentially dangerous emergency response situations and enable critical, real-time command center visibility.”

Jason Holland, director of operation centers and emergency preparedness, Dominion Energy, said: “Delivering the highest levels of service reliability to our customers and meeting priority KPIs, such as reducing service interruption minutes, requires the advanced grid technologies found in Oracle’s FLISR, FlexOps, and Power Flow applications.

“Our long experience with Oracle Utilities NMS and workshop assessments of their power applications convinced us that Oracle could uniquely deliver what we need. As we look ahead to the second phase of our project, their proven OMS capabilities and scalable architecture will give us a modern management path to faster restoration on a single platform.”